Hooray! September's here, and British summertime has arrived*. Hopefully, you all had nice holidays and are feeling rested - and only slightly bitter that you've got to go back to work.
As a result, at The Medium Is Not Enough, service is going to start up again properly, with news, reviews, the regular features, etc, delighting and probably slightly irritating you in equal measure from now on. But due to a minor miracle of planning, etc, I'm going to be working from home three days a week (Monday, Thursday and Friday) for the foreseeable future, so you can probably expect 'heightened' services on these days. Which is handy, because all the new TV seasons are starting on the UK and the US this month.
As some point, there might be a minor upgrade to the blogging software I use, which might provide some new shiny features, too. Or it might just obliterate the whole thing and give me extreme stress. We'll have to see on that one.
Look forward to chatting with you!
* Note for Americans and other aliens: if you're coming to Britain for your vacation, try to book your break for September or else you'll be condemned to rain and extreme humidity your entire stay. September is when it starts to get sunny these days.
Today's Joanna Page is Fat Pig, Neil LaBute's size-related comedy play, which has been running in London for a good few months now. In fact, I've already reviewed it - twice.
However, from the 11th September, it's going to be moving away from the Trafalgar Studios to the Comedy Theatre and Rob Webb and Kris Marshall are going to be replaced by Nick Burns and Kevin Bishop respectively. Then from October, Joanna Page is going to be off filming the Gavin & Stacey Christmas special and is going to be replaced by Kelly Brook. No word on what's happening with Ella Smith, yet.
So here's a publicity shot of our Joanna with Kevin Bishop (photo by Simon Turtle). And this is her (with Matthew Horne) in Gavin & Stacey:
What a chameleon. How's she do that?
PS There's a video on the Fat Pig web site in which Neil LaBute interviews the current cast. In it, Rob Webb admits there was an evening where he chose to play Tom as “a complete spoon” then changed his mind and went back to playing it the original way. Any want to bet he did it on the night that I first went to see it, thus explaining the change in performance by the time I went back to see it again?
It's not often that the biggest fault with a Big Finish play is that it's not long enough. Quite often, you just sit there, watching the tumbleweed go by and glaciers nip past you as you wait for the play to come to its inevitable conclusion.
But for the first time in quite a while, I came to the end of a play and found myself wishing that they'd spent a whole lot more time on it. I'm not saying that it was brilliant, it's just when you have a character who has the potential to be one of the most interesting Doctor Who villains around, an hour doesn't seem like quite enough to explore the character properly, does it?
What's that? Is it the sound of something precious and beautiful being trampled underfoot by philistines and idiots?
Erm, no. Surprisingly, it's not and we have yet another miracle of the post-Grade age: an ITV1 primetime drama that doesn't suck, doesn't insult the intelligence and actually makes you hunger for more.
Any more of this and it'll almost become ordinary, expected even, that ITV1 dramas won't make you feel like you've been hit on the head by a six-pack of Kestrels on a night out in Malia.
Anyway, it is a truth, universally acknowledged, that all women of a certain temperament love Pride and Prejudice, particularly that bit with Colin Firth in the water. Many are the women who know it almost word for word; and no doubt there are many who wish they could be in it, particularly during that bit with Colin Firth in the water.
So Lost in Austen is quite a clever idea, even if sounds a bit daft at first: what would happen if somehow you ended up in the novel Pride and Prejudice, having taken Elizabeth Bennet's place. You're a big fan, you know what's supposed to happen, who's supposed to end up with whom and how.
It's been quite some time since our last Sitting Tennant, which came from Anna. So to kick it off again, here's one I prepared earlier: it's from the finale of the last series of Derren Brown: Trick or Treat, in which DT and friends did all sorts of weird things in an unwitting attempt to get fish to swim.
The current Sitting Tennant league tables stand (ho ho) as follows. For pictures, Rosby is still in the lead with five entries, Persephone at four. Poly with three and a half, Toby on three entries and Scott on two entries. Anna has one and a half and Marie and Rullsenberg are at the back with one each.
The Witty And Amusing Captions league table has changed. Thanks to some dueting between Toby and Persephone, Toby is top now with seven captions, while Marie and Persephone have six, Rullsenberg and Electric Dragon both have three captions and Poly and Stu_N are on one each. Feel free to leave captions below for this entry, too.
Got a picture of David Tennant sitting, lying down or in some indeterminate state in between? Then leave a link to it below and if it's judged suitable, it will appear in the “Sitting Tennant” gallery. You can also enter the witting and amusing captions league table by commenting on existing photos in the gallery.
If you want to watch all the Derren Brown: Trick or Treat episode from which this picture came, here it is on YouTube.
About the blog
This is a UK media blog with daily news, views, exclusive reviews and good conversation. There's a bit of a bias towards the latest and greatest US TV, but we also cover British TV ranging from new Doctor Who to old Z Cars, Property Ladder to Big Brother, and BBC4 to S4C – yes, this blog is firmly part of the conspiracy to promote all things Welsh where possible, particularly Caerdydd.
Add in film, theatre, art, books, events and media journalism and you've (hopefully) got one of the best places on the web for media lovers. Oh yes, and there's The Carusometer, the ultimate guide to quality TV.
About me
I'm Rob Buckley, a freelance journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of. I've edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for trade magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and contributed sarcastic articles about television to the blink-and-you-missed-it "web site for urban hedonists" The Tribe. I'm freelance now and have contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly and TV Scoop. Have pity on me.
Read more on Friday's Sitting Tennant (week 11, 2010)